The S band waveguide came out of the top of the superstructure and up to below the tower deck. Then it passed through the deck just in front of the antenna base. You can see it in the attached image (red line), where it comes up, curves and enters the base just below the foot ring.

From there it rose up the vertical center axis of the base to a rotating waveguide coupling at the very top of the drive platform - the rectangular box contained the slip rings for electrical signals and power and the waveguide coupling. The elevation platform, dish reflector, support arm and scanning head rotated around the vertical axis.

The microwave signals passed through the rotating waveguide coupling and followed a waveguide to the left (looking toward the scanner head) side of the elevation platform where the waveguide curved downward to another rotating waveguide coupling on the horizontal axis of rotation for the elevation platform.

The signals passed through this rotating coupling and into a waveguide inside the support arm leading to the rotating waveguide switch in the scanner head. I have shown the path into the top of the 20 parallel waveguides coming from the rotating switch in the scanner head.

All of this waveguide plumbing was pressurized with dry nitrogen. The SPG-49 tracking radars were also pressurized (I am not sure about the SPS-10 and SPS-43 radars) so you have to figure there were leaks. If you look at my CAD model you will see a lot of green nitrogen gas bottles attached to the superstructure (there were even more in internal compartments).

We had a tracking console in Weapons Control where we could control the SPS-30. It had a small joystick that we could use to set the bearing and elevation for the antenna. Just move it a little bit and tons of antenna would jerk around at the top of the tower. I don't recall for certain, but I'm sure the tracking system was programmed to oscillate the antenna back and forth while doing the vertical scanning to get an accurate height reading for the target.

In heavy seas the ship rolled +/- 30 degrees and pitched +/- 5 degrees, and the radar antennas were at the top of tall towers where they gyrated wildly in 100+ knot winds, rain, hail, snow, ice and salt spray.

When operating the SPS-30 and SPS-43 radars with their huge antennas it was always in the back of my mind what enormous stresses were being forced upon the structures when you changed rotation speeds or just gave that joystick a little twitch.

Here are some images of the elevation drive mechanism. All of the pitch, yaw and elevation mechanisms are very similar - five drive systems in all.

The electric motor drives a screw thread gear that moves a threaded shaft. The darker gray vertical shaft is actually threaded, but I am cutting corners on this one. Screw threads bloat the file size tremendously, and the overall ship is already approaching a gigabyte. So use your imagination.

The lower bearing blocks are attached to the elevation platform. The upper bearing blocks that support the drive mechanism are mounted on the drive platform that rotates around the vertical axis.

The elevation motor moves the threaded rod up and down and this tilts the elevation platform up and down. The tall tube on the top of the assembly is a housing to protect the screw threads on the rod. Originally the lower part of the threaded rod had a rubber cover that protected it from the elements. It would stretch longer or shorter as the antenna was elevated or depressed. But the rubber cover was exposed to sunlight, salt spray and very high winds and that meant a fairly short lifetime.

The last picture shows the drive mechanism installed near the back of the antenna assembly.

In my description of the waveguides in the SPS-30 antenna I left out an important detail. Between the base and the first rotating wave guide coupling on the drive platform the waveguide passes through the pitch and roll stages. These are driven to keep the drive platform level as the ship pitches and rolls. The waveguide must pass through two more rotating couplings in these stages.

From the antenna's viewpoint the base (with ship attached) can rotate about the vertical axis to sweep out a conical area, pivoting around the port/starboard axis (the pitch platform) and the fore aft axis (the roll platform).

Tough to visualize. From the image of a cone, I am kind of wanting to imagine a gimbal or a ball-and-socket. But it appears a waveguide can only rotate around one axis. Is there a vertical displacement between the two (i.e. pitch and roll) rotors?

Incidentally, it is CAD at its best, your re-creation of this beautiful machine. An amazing challenge. Michael

I have a few close-up high resolution photos of the base, roll, pitch and drive stages, and it does appear that the waveguides do have vertical displacements for the roll and pitch joints. I haven't determined the dimensions yet - too many other things interfering with the CAD modeling.

It should be fairly simple because every turn, bend and joint in a waveguide attenuates the signal a bit.

A little more progress. Hikes in the mountains and sunny summer days on the beach are interfering with ship modeling! I have added the drive mechanisms for pitch, roll, azimuth and elevation.

I am working from a few drawings and close-up photos. As the drawing progresses from one part to another I occasionally discover a mistake in earlier work and have to go back and redraw. I thought the tower was a symmetrical rounded square rectangle at the top, but I couldn't get some details of the different rotating stages to align properly. Then I realized I should have paid more attention to one of the drawings. The top of the tower is narrower port/starboard than fore/aft!

Now I can start on all of the electrical boxes - and there are a lot of them!

What a jewel this is, Phil. It is surprising to see all this intricate mechanical, electromechanical and hydraulic machinery put to work in the service of an (arguably) higher technology — guiding gigahertz waves precisely and efficiently from source to target. Especially admire the third image shown above. Amazing. Michael

One of the most tedious parts of modeling is stringing the rigging on a sailing ship or running the wiring on a modern ship. This sort of thing is even more tedious in CAD modeling. Tying a knot in CAD is one of the most challenging operations!

The SPS-30 antenna had a lot of external wiring. Getting it all to "hang" naturally and look correct is a trail and error successive approximation process. I have the majority of the wiring done, and it looks pretty close to the wiring in photographs. Maybe not perfect, but it will have to be good enough! I'm ready to finish it!

There are only a few details left. I must add the new SPS-30 to the after tower. Two smaller antennas on the after radar tower need to be reworked and the identification flags will be added to the forward tower. And the catwalk on the after funnel must be reworked.Then all the parts of the ship will be finished! Maybe.

The SPS-30 did not carry an integrated IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) antenna as some other radar antennas did. An AS-791/UPA-43 IFF antenna was mounted on the aft tower platform close to the SPS-30 and slaved to it so it pointed in the same direction and rotated at the same rate. When the SPS-30 was installed in 1963 a different IFF antenna was installed, but it was replaced by the AS-791 by 1967. This model is approximate. The overall dimensions were taken from data sheets but the details came from some not-too-clear photos.

Attachment:

AS791-UPA43 IFF 1 small.jpg [ 133.06 KiB | Viewed 458 times ]

Also on the aft tower platform was an AS-979/UKR telemetry antenna. I think, but I am not certain, this was the antenna that received telemetry information from Talos missiles in flight. Some missiles had telemetry packages installed that sent back detailed readings of multiple data streams for wing position, engine operation and proximity fuze target detection signals. All Talos ships had an AS-979 mounted close to the SPG-49 Talos target tracking antennas and SPW-2 Talos missile guidance transmitter antennas. The antenna had 12 ground plane elements radiating from the base and a helical antenna inside the truncated cone cover. The model is based upon photoguestimation from several photographs.

Attachment:

AS979 UKR antenna 1 small.jpg [ 118 KiB | Viewed 458 times ]

Attachment:

AS979 UKR antenna 2 small.jpg [ 103.62 KiB | Viewed 458 times ]

Here is a picture of the Oklahoma City aft radar tower with the antennas installed, in the configuration of mid 1971.

Attachment:

aft tower 11 Sep 2018 3 small.jpg [ 128.84 KiB | Viewed 458 times ]

The AS-979 telemetry antenna was initially (1963) installed in the same position on all of the Talos CLGs (USS Galveston CLG-3, USS Little Rock CLG-4 and USS Oklahoma City CLG-5), using the same platform extension on the aft side of the tower platform. Later (1974) on the Little Rock and Oklahoma City the AS-979 telemetry antennas were moved forward on the aft tower platform closer to the SPS-30 and another telemetry antenna was mounted at the AS-979's original position. The Galveston was decommissioned in 1970 before this change was made.

The AS-791 IFF antenna was mounted in different places on the three Talos CLGs. On the Galveston it appears to have been mounted on the main platform behind the SPS-30 when the '30 was installed in 1963. But photos from 1967 appear to show the antenna, or something like it, at the front edge of the midships radar tower. Unfortunately, all pictures I have seen have been low resolution and grainy, and it is not possible to identify these antennas with certainty.

The Little Rock had the AS-791 IFF antenna mounted on a platform extension at the starboard front of the aft tower platform. On the Oklahoma City it was mounted on a platform extension at the starboard rear of the aft tower platform, as shown in the picture above.

Here are some images of the (almost) finished after deck house that sat on top of the missile house. The deck house, missile house and launcher file is 303.89 megabytes, with 917,261 entities and 6,839,679 points.

I say almost finished, because I thought it would be finished after I reworked the SPS-30, AS-979 and AS-791 antennas. But while I was on the ship I took some black and white photos specifically to capture details in case I someday wanted to create a model of the ship. I forgot about these pictures and the negatives were hidden away in a foot locker in the garage until a few years ago (after the original aft deck house 3D CAD model was completed). Now I have scanned them and I used them for the latest antenna updates. But I noticed a few more details missing from my model while I was placing the revised antennas on the after tower. So I guess there will be one more round of scrutinizing these photos to fill out the details on the after deck house.

Thanks. I didn't have any CAD tools for cable routing, and it was (is) tedious!

I have seen your CAD model of the KGV and it is excellent. You started on it in 2004, the same year I started on the OK City model. It has been such a long and continuous part of my life I don't know what I will do when it is actually finished!

It's done (mostly)! Here are images of the finished CAD model of the USS Oklahoma City CLG-5 in the configuration of the summer of 1971. After 14 years and many hundreds of hours the model is basically finished. I need to add the SH-2 Seasprite helicopter, and I suppose there are still some small details I will discover, but it is good enough to start on the drawings for the 1:96 model.

These images are composites of four images for each view angle - the hull and the forward, midships and after superstructures. I pasted them together in Photoshop. I still haven't combined all four files into a single whole ship file - that will be several days work. Generating images from the whole ship file will take many hours.

The four files add up to 1.071 gigabytes, but there are a few overlapping elements in the superstructure files that will be removed. The whole ship file will be still be about a gigabyte. There are 2.86 million objects in the files, and a bit more than 22 million points. You can find many more detail images here:

PS: Before anyone gets excited about creating 3D prints from the model, keep in mind that almost all of it was created with zero thickness surfaces that will not print, and not solids. The model can be used to create real solids that would print, but that would take more years of work.